While in the mountains my girl and I managed to watch a few flicks in between all the hiking, eating, and exploring.  I’ve already reviewed one of them, 2010’s exquisite Black Swan.  Our second night we figured out how to hook up my little laptop to the cabin’s television and rented 2021’s Wrong Turn ($4 on Amazon).

The film came up in our conversations while driving throughout the mountains.  I remarked on how anybody could be out in the woods and we’d likely have no idea, and my girlfriend enthusiastically proclaimed, “we have to watch Wrong Turn!”

The film is a reboot of a series of films dating back to 2003.  My girlfriend said she’d recently watched the 2003 original, but that the 2021 version is much better.  I haven’t seen the original, so I can’t comment on that assessment; apparently, it has a very The Hills Have Eyes feel to it, as it’s all about a group of cannibals stalking stranded college students.  However, I can affirm that the 2021 version was a good romp through a strange world of mountain dwellers gone rogue.

First, I should note that the movie has all of the woke tropes of films made in the last five years or so:  interracial couples, an obnoxious grrrrrrlboss type (refreshing, however, not the lead character), an interracial gay couple, etc.  That this motley crew of Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity are hiking a portion of the Appalachian Trail strains credulity in and of itself, but never mind that.  If I stopped watching movies because they check off all the DIE boxes, I’d never be able to watch anything made after 2010.  Besides, the most annoying characters get killed off, anyway.

Anyway, despite ample warnings from mysteriously inhospitable and mercurial people in town, the group goes off the trail to find an abandoned fort.  Jen, the protagonist, thinks she glimpses someone in the trees, and then a massive log rolls down the side and crushes one of the hikers.  It’s a truly gruesome way to go, but it also scatters the campers and throws them badly off-course.

It’s soon apparent they’re quite lost—and not quite alone.  They setup camp for the night, only to find they’ve made camp in an ancient cemetery, which bears an inscription dating to 1859.  The inscription tells that a group called “The Foundation” established the mountain as a new nation, fearing the dissolution of the United States in the coming American Civil War.

The obnovious grrrrrlboss has wandered off, and the group immediately panic.  I must note that this movie is one of those “the-characters-are-stupid” ones, in which the character’s bad, irrational decisions get them into trouble.  Often such movies are terrible, but this flick is at least understandable:  a bunch of city folks are lost in the woods and facing death, injury, and hunger.  They make some boneheaded moves out of desperation, fear, and panic.

Like desecrating an ancient graveyard, which I took as a motivation for the actions of the mysterious “Foundation” dwellers, who, it seems, live a quasi-caveman existence, wearing scary animal hides and masks (ostensibly to mask their scent to animals they’re hunting) and setting boobytraps all over their mountain.

Here is where I found a glaring narrative and tonal inconsistency in the film.  For the first half, the film actually sets up the murderous hillbillies as sympathetic, and merely defending their territory against idiots who have desecrated their graves and mucked about on their land.  Indeed, one of the group—the grrrrlboss’s impulsive, insecure boyfriend—slaughters two masked men who are carrying one of their friends on a spit (like the Ewoks in 1983’s Return of the Jedi), only to find out later that the men were carrying the friend off the mountain.  That’s revealed when the surviving members of the group are captured by the Foundation, and the impulsive boyfriend is tried for murder.

While the ways of the Foundation are certainly primitive and barbaric, there is a certain survivalist logic at play.  They were founded as a multiracial, multiethnic utopia on the mountain, meant to protect the “true” America as war loomed between the North and South.  They honor members’ racial differences and set traps on the mountain for animals—or so they claim.  It becomes pretty clear that many of the traps are just wicked boobytraps set to kill those who wander too far from the marked trail.

Anyway, the group tries to cover for their friend, but there is ample evidence that he did it, so he is sentenced to death, and they are sentenced to the “darkness,” meaning they are to blinded and cast into a dark tunnel with other sufferers.  The fast-talking Jen offers up her supple young body to the tribe as a wife, and argues that her community organizer (groan) black boyfriend can use his problem-solving and conflict-resolution skills to help the tribe.

Jen becomes the wife of Venable, the leader of the Foundation, and her now-ex-boyfriend becomes a leading warrior.  But all the while, Jen’s architect father has been investigating his daughter’s disappearance, and hires trackers to locate his daughter.  Naturally, the trackers die, but the upper-middle class dad somehow fumbles his way to the Foundation’s settlement.  Jen shoots him in the leg and, later, mounts her massive husband, saying, “I’ve made my choice.”  Primal lovemaking is implied as the screen fades to black.

Ah—but it was all a ruse!  Jen and her father escape, with black boyfriend electing to stay behind because he finally found the sense of purpose that he was looking for.  In their six weeks of captivity, Jen somehow became an expert with a bow and arrow (seriously, firing a bow is really hard—there’s no way she learned to shoot it with such accuracy in such a short amount of time, but, hey, “strong female character,” right?), and there’s a gun for some reason, a revolver.  I counted the shots and the film does, too—at a critical moment, they’re all out of bullets.

Insanity ensues but Jen and her dad make it home.  Then Venable and his weird, mute daughter show up, dressed in respectable, modern clothes, and take Jen back.  As the credits roll, the van carrying the group crashes, as Jen singlehandedly murders everyone in the RV except for the girl.  Yay, strong female characters!

In writing this review, I am realizing more of the holes in the story.  Were the mountain folk lying when they said they were carrying that one girl off the mountain?  Why did Venable go through the trouble of recovering one woman?  I suppose Jen was his “wife,” but, come now—it was quite clearly a hostage situation.  If the traps are for hunting, why does one of them include a massive log that falls from above, smashing prey that would have already died in the spike-filled pit below?  Wouldn’t such a trap ruin the meat?

Maybe everyone is lying.  Who knows?  What made the flick enjoyable, though, is the first half kept me guessing.  There were several twists and turns, and while I could see around the bend on several of them, some of them left me stumped.  The Foundation is introduced slowly and in dribbles of information, which kept me glued to the screen (even with my beautiful girlfriend there as an attractive potential distraction!).  I thought the filmmakers were making a comment about the sacredness of community and heritage and the like, but the Foundation residents never seemed angry about the campers setting up tents among their gravestones (even though that was accidental).

It’s an entertaining movie, and if you ignore all the woke casting—again, kind of a necessity with most films now—it’s pretty fun and suspenseful.  The first half of the film is excellent, and the writers crammed what felt (in a good way) like two hours of story into the first forty-five minutes quite well.

It probably helps if you don’t know what’s going to happen first, either.  Sorry about that.